


Expertise

by MidwinterMonday



Series: Another Country [2]
Category: The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Anti-Hero, Circle Era, F/M, First Kiss, First Time, Mild Sexual Content, Practice Kissing, Romance, School Era, Sexual Inexperience, Sexual Tension, Valentine's Day Fluff, pre-Jocelyn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-24 22:51:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9790661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MidwinterMonday/pseuds/MidwinterMonday
Summary: How do evil overlords come by their worldly experience? Who teaches the dark anti-hero everything he knows about sex and seduction? Questions one probably shouldn't ask — but once you do the temptation to answer is irresistible.Valentine, the summer he turns sixteen. A first-sexual-awakening (anti-) romance for Valentine's(!) Day, with apologies for irresponsible fluff.





	

**Author's Note:**

> _On the whole, I try very hard not to pry into my characters' sex lives. (Ok, I know they're really Clare's characters, not mine, but...). And of all them all, I'm particularly disposed to respect Valentine's privacy. Not a man to take vulgar curiosity in good part!_
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> _So I'm not really sure where this little fic came from — an unexpected window into his adolescence which just opened up without warning. It's a sort of outtake, really: something I should know better than to post because it's a just a scrap of intimate personal history that doesn't really belong in the stories I'm telling. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that it — or something like it — is true. And as his (self-appointed) biographer, I'm inclined to let the record stand._
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> _I admit I initially had some doubts about whether this really happened — if anyone strikes me as fundamentally a prude, it’s Valentine. The whole trilogy sets up a subtle contrast between the louche, transgressive, vaguely decadent world of Downtown (oops, I mean Downworld :) — with its pink-haired faeries, its seedy, hard-drinking werewolves and flamboyantly gay warlocks — and the faintly Swiss, uptight, traditionalist culture of Idris.* And, well, Valentine is the arch-spokesman for the Clave’s visceral antipathy to Downworlders, in this story where biological and sexual ‘deviance’ are so suggestively aligned...._
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> _Still, setting yourself to learn what sexual pleasure is — how to harness, deploy and resist it — is not the same as indulging in it. I don’t think Valentine has ever approved of casual sex; but his distaste has more to do with contempt for unbridled sensuality and a kind of fastidiousness about human passions than the belief that it’s intrinsically immoral. So the events of this story suddenly seemed extremely plausible to me. I’m quite certain Jocelyn is the only woman Valentine has ever loved, and I’m almost as certain that he is not the innocent that Jocelyn is when he finally sets about winning her. Which seemed to make something like this encounter inescapable._
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> Canon: My fics take the original City of Bones trilogy as canon. (For more about why I haven't read the later MI books, see my profile).
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> As always, everything in this fic belongs to the incomparable Cassandra Clare: characters, story and universe, of course, but also tone and language and imagery, which I've borrowed shamelessly to try to get closer to the feel of her story. To the extent that I've succeeded, the credit is entirely hers.
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> _________________________  
>  _*Ok, obviously there is a leather-clad, goth side to Clare's Shadowhunters; the contrast is not 100% imaginatively stable — no doubt in part because (as Chesterton observes of Father Brown), you can’t do battle with evil as priests and Nephilim do, and remain innocent. Dealing with the Shadow World requires — instills — a degree of worldliness. Still, one's mental image of the Alicante that Jocelyn, Luke and the Lightwoods grew up in is not one of sexual license, nor does the Clave’s hostility to homosexuality seem particularly surprising...._

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|o|

Raven-haired and alarmingly pretty, with snapping eyes and a lively, forward manner, she arrives at the Morgenstern manor the summer after his fourth year at school: replacement for the kitchen maid abruptly summoned home to her widowed mother after her father got himself decapitated by a wandering Tankuni demon.  She’s older than he is by several years, old enough to discharge her household duties with the brisk competence his father expects of his servants — and to be thoroughly practised in the deployment of her manifold physical charms.

In hindsight, he’s not quite certain when he became aware of her, but somehow her path is forever crossing his on the narrow stairs and dim passageways of the rambling, ancient manor house: flattening herself respectfully against the wainscoting to let him pass but with a warmth in her eyes and a challenge in the half-smile lingering on her lips that makes him fascinatingly aware of her body inches away from his.  The invitation is plain, would be obvious even to a sensibility far less acute than his: _if you want me I am yours, to do what you want with._

He has other things to think about, but he dockets the fact for further consideration, because she is exceptionally attractive, with a tidy, curving figure her demure uniform only barely contains, and a knowing, almost disquieting gleam underneath her black lashes that undeniably stirs his blood.

His father would profoundly disapprove: in these matters, as so many others, Reinhardt Morgenstern’s views are rigidly straitlaced.  But disregarding his father’s inexhaustible disapproval — flouting, it even — is one of his projects for this holiday.

Not that he is under any illusions about the girl, or his own feelings: this is entirely an opportunity for a little recreation — and training.  Aside from a few juvenile kissing-games beneath the mistletoe, it’s an aspect of life he has not so far seriously addressed himself to.

In the long view, of course, he knows exactly where he is going, has known it almost from the day she arrived at the school, red hair straggling wildly from the knot at the back of her neck as she and Lucian dragged her vast trunk of possessions up the front steps.

But there’s no hurry there. It will be some time yet before she comes tame to his hand.  For now, the first rule of the huntsman is patience: invisible and absolute. And in the meantime...

In the meantime, he decides, cantering dutifully at his father’s heels on the latest of his idiotic, self-appointed forest patrols, he’s got an interesting new set of skills to acquire and hone.

And surely he deserves a little entertainment in a long, dire summer of dancing attendance on his father’s iron whims, and his crackpot one-man war on Downworld — as though the mongrel races were the biggest threat the Nephilim were up against.  Really, the old warrior’s obsession with charting the growth of Idris’s Downworld populations is getting close to a mania.

But there’s no arguing with his father.  He has learnt that lesson the hard way.  Better to keep your head down: do as you’re told, at least as far as anyone can see — and perfect the art of subterfuge.  Reinhardt Morgenstern may have a heavy hand, but in the last instance he isn’t all that clever.  Not as clever as his son, at any rate. And if the flinty old tyrant is too pig-headed to see beyond the tedious Downworld bee in his bonnet — well it’s been obvious for some time now that if the Nephilim are to be saved from destruction, it’s no use looking to the older generation to do it.

He’s stuck out here for another six weeks; six weeks when he’ll be lucky if any word from Alicante or his promising little band of acolytes makes its way into this remote fastness.  Few Shadowhunter families live this deep into the wild lands by Lake Lyn — and his father’s unsociability is matched only by his rooted dislike for the Glass City and its inhabitants.  But he has his books and his experiments, one or two of which are showing exciting signs of promise; and whatever he may think of his father, there is no one in the world who will train him harder or better.

And then there is the girl....

So when he walks into the library the next day to find without surprise that she is already there, poised halfway up the tall library ladder with her duster in hand and her neat skirt and apron looking suddenly delightfully and indecorously short, he greets her with a lazy smile and crosses slowly to stand beneath her, shoulders propped against the carved bookcase.  She colours fetchingly and smiles back at him, a slow, provocative smile.  There is no question she knows he can see straight up her dress.

For the space of a heartbeat, she gazes down at him; and then her smile widens enchantingly.  Holding out her bare arms to him with a charming little lift of her wrists, she murmurs,

“Lift me down, Master Valentine?”

Her skin is the colour of fresh cream, flawless and smooth as the alabaster vases that flank his father’s mantelpiece; her small hands are delicate and shapely.  Even at this distance, he can see the pulse fluttering in her throat.

Reaching up, he curves his hands around her waist and swings her lightly down.  She’s heavier than she looks, her flesh firm and warm as a sun-ripe peach beneath his fingers. He can feel her breathing accelerate as he sets her smoothly on her feet, hands lingering at her waist.  He’s forgotten how diminutive she is: her dark, glossy head level with his shoulder, scarcely taller than the cunning little faerie assassin he killed in yesterday’s raid. The myrtle snares she’d ambushed him with turned his cold steel to dust; in the end, he’d strangled her with his bare hands.  The clean, cold, expert violence of it still sends a cool ripple of satisfaction through him, as he remembers.

But the girl in his hands now is looking at him with an expression in her cornflower eyes that sends a very different current of electricity sparking through his nerves.  He can feel every line of her body against his, as if the tiny space that remains between them were already gone.  For the space of a breath, he gazes down at the heart-shaped face raised to his, listening to the drumbeat of his own pulse and watching every tiny change in her expression, the life-blood electric in his veins.  Her lips are parted; the flush in her cheeks rosy and warm. He hears her breath catch.  Then, cupping his hand in the raw silk of her hair, he bends his head and kisses her.

She smells of roses and soap and freshly-laundered linen.  The soft curves of her body press closer against him as her arms slide around his neck, her kiss deepening, small fingers digging into the bare skin of his shoulder with a sharp, sweet pleasure his senses can’t wholly distinguish from pain.  And then he is kissing her back, his mouth hard and purposeful on hers, desire coursing dark as ichor through his veins.  With one detached part of his mind he notes the quickening of his own breathing, the queer lightness in his limbs, the white fire spinning through his nerve ends in bright showers of sparks as he yields his senses up to pleasure.  This is uncharted territory.  He has a lot to learn.

Ignorance is not a state that recommends itself to Valentine Morgenstern. He doesn’t intend to remain there for long.

After that, they meet almost every day unless his father has requisitioned him for some fresh expedition: in the library; by the tilting ground; in the empty storeroom at the top of the attic stairs, the light from the dormer windows throwing diamonds of shadow across her vivid face that spill fascinatingly down the arching line of her neck, her delicate collarbones, and on down beyond, their quick gasps echoing off the dusty rafters.  They are careful and discreet — both of them are highly practised in the art of evading detection — but the ever-present possibility of being caught gives an extra frisson to their encounters, and keeps their clothes on, more or less.

Which is fine with him for now. He has been master of his body for as long as he can remember.  Self-discipline is the Shadowhunter’s first, most indispensable weapon, as his father never tires of reminding him, and he has been brought up to ignore the demands of the flesh — hunger, cold, weariness, pain — from the time he could walk.  He’s got all summer to master this interesting new art, and he intends to take it methodically, as he would any other skill.

He can see too that it is driving her a little crazy; and as he acknowledges to himself, the banked fire of his own desires, the awareness of their mutual hunger, pent-up together a millimetre — a tinder spark — away from combustion, rather sharpens the pleasure of it all.  No reason not to take his time...

 

|o|

 

**Author's Note:**

> _I'd planned on posting this all in one go, but I'm running out of time if it's to go up for Valentine's Day! So here's a first installment anyway. The rest is nearly done!_
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> _And for my faithful readers — I know it's been ages since I updated! I haven't given up on my unfinished fics, I promise. They just got...more complicated than I expected. I've got a couple of other stories on the table as well I hope to get up this spring. But this little fic just kind of insinuated itself into my head and demanded to be written NOW. So I did. Hope you enjoy it! Let me know... —MM_


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